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Mexico’s state of Veracruz; NOW the Country’s Biggest Mass Grave!

This aerial image shows the area known as Colinas de Santa Fe where Mexican authorities work to find the remains of people buried in mass graves on the outskirts of Veracruz. More than 250 skulls were found there earlier this year in what appears to be a drug cartel’s mass burial ground, prosecutors said.

In a sobering new report, “Veracruz: Fixing Mexico’s State of Terror,” the International Crisis Group describes the crime- and corruption-plagued region as “emblematic of the challenges facing the country as a whole.” Veracruz has at least 2,750 unresolved disappearance cases, but civil society groups say as many as 20,000 people could be missing.

Just this week, police discovered a note near the tortured bodies of two women and nine men. “You want a war, you’ll get a war,” it reportedly read. Veracruz Gov. Miguel Ángel Yunes Linares said the killings, like more than 70 percent of recent homicide cases, were linked to organized crime gangs.

Veracruz atrocities largely stem from political failures that include ineffective law enforcement strategies, systemic obstruction of justice and a lack of judicial accountability, the International Crisis Group report says.

The recent history of Veracruz, the gruesome details of which are starting to emerge, underlines the crisis not of one state administration but of the Mexican political system as a whole, where a well-intended democratic transition has fallen short of expectations and become corroded by organized crime. The ease with which political power-holders have been able to pursue criminal ambitions points to structural weaknesses in the democratic system.